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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25955014">vite ante acta (a life done before)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/houfukuseisaku/pseuds/houfukuseisaku'>houfukuseisaku</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Evillious Chronicles</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 08:09:19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,185</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25955014</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/houfukuseisaku/pseuds/houfukuseisaku</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Meta Salmhofer dies. But there are many ways she could have lived.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>0.</p>
<p>The easiest way. Meta simply does not come into being. Whether by failure of birth or failure of realization, an experiment never thought of and thus never carried out.</p>
<p>What does not exist, cannot die.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>1.</p>
<p>She does not run, and consequently becomes Seth’s assistant. She lives in Lunaca Labora, a non-entity to the rest of the world. Sometimes a boy with blue hair is brought over, never for long—(long enough for her to become attached to his tranquil fury, simmering just under the surface)—but mostly she keeps to herself, a silent servant to Seth’s whims, who won’t grace his forked silver tongue with anything but barely-restrained distaste.</p>
<p>Mostly she watches over the boy in the black box, sleeping and never to wake. Sometimes she sings him a lullaby.</p>
<p>She lives alone. But she lives.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>2.</p>
<p>By some prank of fate, the boy in the black box wakes up. With eyes like myriad stars and wings of jagged glass and polished stone, he holds out his hand to her. Together they leave. Who can stop them? He is the angel of destruction, and she is the one who sang him to peacefulness every night, a lullaby that quelled what would have otherwise been an imploding sun.</p>
<p>Infinite worlds of infinite possibilities open up to her. They travel to every dimension, every branch of time and every warp of space, transient outsiders content to live their lives wandering the universes.</p>
<p>She never once looks back.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>3.</p>
<p>This time she reaches out to that boy with blue hair and angry eyes. The fire that festers in him lights a candleflame in her own heart, and they conspire to make their escape from the laboratory with a false starry sky.</p>
<p>Outside, in a world she has never seen and that has never seen her, Meta realizes she does not know what to do. She has been kept in the dark this whole time. But the boy—he is firelight, her beacon in her darkness. They stay together, and they become angry together, and with enough time they amass power and connections and topple the Senate in one fell swoop, crushing it under the weight of their shared wrath.</p>
<p>She becomes Queen, and Adam her King. They do not love each other, but they do not have to.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>4.</p>
<p>The farmer is not cruel to her. Though her inheritor power seeps out of her like a leaking faucet, the trickle is paltry enough that she manages to hypnotize him not to lust after her, but to love her like a father would a child. She grows up as his adopted daughter. One with terrifying destructive tendencies, aimed both inward and outward, but he attributes that to a miserable childhood and loves her all the more fiercely for it.</p>
<p>Living on a farm isn’t exactly exciting, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>5.</p>
<p>She does not lose her memories. But she does lose something else.</p>
<p>The fall from the cliff leaves her broken in some ways but not in others. She lives off the forest’s bounty for the first few days, scavenging what she can to survive. A village takes her in, and the chief’s daughter becomes her doctor and nurse and companion.</p>
<p>Her heart burns with the instinct to rip, tear, kill, destroy—but her body cannot obey, weakened as it is. Her companion—(her not-quite-lover, but she won’t admit that to anyone, because love is a weakness)—distracts her with stories and songs. It works only sometimes.</p>
<p>She suffers. With Eve by her side, she suffers a bit less.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>6.</p>
<p>She does not fall in love with Pale because she still sees Seth in him, amnesia be damned. Their partnership is a strained pretense, both sides using and being used by each other. She works for him in Apocalypse, but out of her own love for chaos and death. Nothing so binding as love for another.</p>
<p>When things go downhill, she swiftly makes her exit. She is fundamentally selfish and self-serving, and that is what saves her in the end.</p>
<p>Apocalypse burns. She does not burn with it.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>7.</p>
<p>On the run as she is, Meta cannot trust anyone. Even the ground beneath her feet. But a little black bird follows her wherever she goes, no matter how hard she tries to shake it off. Perhaps it finds her amusing. Perhaps it is something else.</p>
<p>She does not make friends with it (because friendship is an attachment and a liability and she already has two of those clutched close to her breast) but she does come to tolerate its presence. When she closes her eyes to rest for the moment, she trusts it to warn her of any incoming dangers by the sound of its croaking caw. Not because she trusts the damned bird, but she trusts that it too has a sense of self-preservation.</p>
<p>So, before she can make a particular turn one night, the bird trills a warbling call, like a human long-unaccustomed to singing. She stops in her tracks and immediately changes course, heading in a different direction without pause.</p>
<p>Two witches do not meet that night, and both are better off for it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>8.</p>
<p>She runs into a bear—and it’s about time, really, with how long she’s been wandering the deeper, darker parts of the forest—and barely manages to set her children down upon a patch of soft moss before there are fangs and claws closed around her, huffing growls and saliva dripping down her arm.</p>
<p>It doesn’t hurt.</p>
<p>When she comes to, somehow having lost consciousness (being almost-eaten-not-eaten by a bear would probably do that to you) and regaining it bit by bit, the bear is no longer there. There are heavy, lumbering tracks leading away but it’s not like she has any reason to follow it, and when she sees her children sleeping still with a single red fruit nestled between them, she has to stop herself from laughing because it would probably warp into a hysteric wail halfway through.</p>
<p>The bear had not eaten her, but it had eaten away something within her all the same. For the first time in forever, she doesn’t hear any whispers of destruction in the beat of her heart, no malice consuming her soul.</p>
<p>She is free.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>9.</p>
<p>Before she leaves him behind for the sake of her babies, Pale in his too-small child’s body presses a gun into her hands, six silver bullets loaded within. On lonely nights she wraps her fingers around the grip and pretends that she can still feel his warmth lingering on the cold metal.</p>
<p>By the time Eve steals her babies, there’s only one bullet left. But one bullet is all she needs.</p>
<p>She gives chase.</p>
<p>At the exact moment Eve spins on her heel to face her, unseeing eyes glassing over bright red, Meta pulls the trigger.</p>
<p>The sound of the gunshot is concealed by the peal of thunder.</p>
<p>Adam opens the door to the scent of gunpowder and charred flesh. There is only one body, and Meta is long gone.</p>
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